>>17051846>Leaves family to become a pirate>Tells NO ONE>Tries to perpetuate the war for ReasonsYeah he was terrible. At least Flit and Kio were ideological opposites two generations apart which would be a better story how they reconcile their differences, and if Kio was less a Kira.

>>17051854I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about everything he does from the very beginning of his arc all the way to the end. Even his finale was half-assed, with him and Zeheart teaming up to stop the thing. Asshole can't even do shit on his own.

He's not a dependable character, and is often the core cause of any major problem or disaster in this arc. This isn't written in a way that makes him seem like a tragic or interesting character, but instead comes off as a dumbass who keeps inviting problems and forcing people to suffer or die because of it.

Let's not forget that Asemu had an entire episode about a helmet that makes its wearer retarded, and is warned multiple times that it would make him retarded, but he still fucking lunges at the chance to wear it. He goes for it because he believes it will give him some edge to win fights he has been losing because (and the show emphasizes this) he has putting ZERO time into working hard and training to match his opponents.

Keep in mind, that even if Flit was an X-Rounder, we still saw him training and working hard to keep up with the UE/Vagans. Asemu just keeps lunging at shortcuts and asking people to do the work for him.

He's a giant loser and the fact that anyone on this board praises him is mind boggling to me.

>>17051842Because people here are fucking stupid. The best arc of AGE is the first gen, by a gigantic margin, Fardain and all. Taken on its own, Gen 1 is a story of a cycle of revenge, Grodek unintentionally passing all his hatred onto Flit and turning him from a starry-eyed youth to a vengeful adult who will eventually age into a bitter old man. Even the Fardain arc, which people grumbled about endlessly while it was happening, has the payoff of giving the Diva the backup it needs for the final mission and mirrors the theme of the arc: it's a microcosm of what happens with Grodek and Flit, people passing their vendettas on across generations long past when anyone remembers the reasons why the fighting started. It's still full of shitty writing, but it's a cohesive story with a clear set of themes. I'd even go so far as to call it good, if I was in a good mood.

Gen 2, in addition to everything in >>17051877, is an empty meandering arc where nothing happens. Do you remember what happened in Gen 2 other than the brain damage helmet and super pilot fight? I don't. They spent I think it was six fucking episodes in high school, and then they went to a bunch of places in space that had never been mentioned before and are never mentioned again, at some point they got the brain damage helmet, Asem killed twelve aces in one fight, and then the Vegans dropped a ship onto the Earth. Flit takes over the world and purges all the Vegan sympathizers, literally the next episode Flit's out of power and the Federation is full of Vegan sympathizers.

None of this meaningfully advances the overarching narrative, no significant character or setting development occurs that isn't wiped away by the timeskip, nothing. The only thing Gen 2 does is introduce Asem and Zeheart, who after the timeskip are entirely different people because of things that happened completely offscreen. It's a useless waste of space of an arc and by far the worst part of AGE in hindsight.

>>17051804>>17051832The first and second arcs are ok, but the third ruins them retroactively. The bad guys motivation was completely retarded, the final boss only shows up in the final episode and is a non-threat, the mc is a race traitor with retarded ideals, and the horrible doctator bad guy is painted in a good light and dies at peace knowing his dream has been realized. Genocide Grandpa was the only good thing from that arc aside from some of the designs, and they blueball his crowning moment of awesome

>>17051877That's the whole point of Asemu, is whole arc was about him having a serious legacy and inferiority complex. It's about his frustration of basically everyone and everything in the whole damn show telling him he'll never be as good as Zeheart or Flit, his own father. He can work just as hard or even harder than them and it'll never happen, that's why he got desperate enough to steal the helmet His whole arc and character back then is basically him learning that reality and finding a way to get good in his own way. Asemu never asked people to carry him, infact he did the opposite and kept trying to solo everything to prove he's good, only to fuck up.

>>17051832Most of AGE's bad rep comes from you suddenly sitting up in the middle or aftermath of a story arc and realizing that they completely missed several storytelling opportunities in favor of either lukewarm approaches or because they're flat out of time by the 3rd arc.

>>17051877>>17051963>could have had 2nd arc kick-start some exposition about X-Rounders instead of Ezelcant's lecture in 3rd arc>develop Asemu into a true super pilot that uses his enemies' 2fast4u reaction and instincts against them by setting them up with feints and false movements, sets him up as a foil to oldFlit in 3rd arc in not just ideals but even in the way they do battle, making Kio's position in-between them more meaningful

>we get the ironic version, SUPER PILOT, where he just suddenly styles all over his opponents once the music kicks in >AGE-2 Double Bullet is a literal "WTF did they really need a transformation gimmick for this shit"-tier MS

>>17051854I really liked how Flit fell. In Gen 1 he wants to be the savior of humanity, during the Fardain arc he wants people to put aside old hatreds and flips out for Desil treating war like a game. Come Gen 3 he wants to genocide the Vagans who turned out to be human after all, is unwilling to put aside his own hatred until the very end, and teaches Kio to treat war like a game through his secret training methods. It felt really well done in that respect, even if his redemption was ham-fisted.

Also, I find it hilarious how Kio isn't called out in SRW. But then again, when you see the arguments Z made against Kira they don't really apply to Kio. Kio isn't attacking both sides, he works to defend downed pilots, he doesn't overpower enemies when they refuse to listen, he tries to talk things out rather than solve everything through violence, and the like. Kio is less of a power fantasy than Kira, which is why I believe he got a pass while Flit was called a disgrace to Gundam by Bright.

>>17057377The biggest thing about Z is, underneath it all, they call out Destiny's writing. Kira is supposed to be anti-war, but is a power fantasy we're supposed to cheer for as he goes around blasting everyone into submission. It's hypocritical, so they hammer home Kira is a terrorist who doesn't even attempt non-violent resolution in order to get what he (or his friends) want. The writers don't seem to hate him though, as Z's writing does a good bit to present him in a more humanizing, yet flawed, light rather than the "hero of justice" he comes off as in canon.

Bandai and Level 5 dropped the ball hard on that one by attempting to recreate 079, Zeta and ZZ with a less faggy Kira instead of a Judeau into one anime that eventually became kiddie fodder. They had already opened the floodgates of retardation with the ELS, the least they could do was let the Vagan be some kind of cosmic horror enemy that terrorised them and let the story of two generations flow with a heavy focus on constant improvization of the war tools, with Flit being the X-Rounder with the Age-1 having relying on his psycho-powers and Asemu being the normal human that the Vagan can't read and acts like how anon said here : >>17052755

Even if this didn't happen and we still had to go with the retarded version we were given, if we simply had a generational conflict that spanned only between Flit and Asemu and the Vagan were as bit cruel as they were envisioned instead of pussying out via Ze-Char and still use the whole Flit-Asemu rival dynamic to make them opossites of each other in more than just combat approaches, with Flit losing sight and becoming a genocidal maniac while Asemu tries to protect his family by simply protecting them instead of nuking the enemy to oblivion, leading to more tension that people can empathize with instead of "Lol, gonna become a space pirate now because I rule" or "Let me teach my unsuspecting Grandkid how to become a Genocider by playing with him on the weekends".

>>17051846>Asemu is a terrible character and is guilty of worse shit than anything people pretend Kio is responsible for.Oh yes, because Asemu totally stopped allies from getting killshots on Vagans but doing nothing to save those same allies with his magical pacifism funnels.

>>17059386Not that guy, but Asemu basically committed treason and prolonged a supposedly already bloody war (Not that anyone could tell, most places in the show seem far removed from the war, even in the third arc) for the sake of preventing an escalation because of the ex-db or something like that. Kio was an active hindrance to his teammates. I will not bother trying to defend him. But Asemu was a straight-up traitor. He didn't switch to the Vagans, but that doesn't detract from the fact that he knowingly and willingly took the lives of his former allies.

And then after a couple of years of murdering his said former allies, he's allowed to just come back with no repercussions at all. Do you think anyone else in the Federation would've received such forgiveness? Most people would be put in front of a firing squad for half the shit he did. So why does he walk free? Because he's a fucking Asuno. You'd think that someone would that information to discredit or even blackmail the Asunos, but I guess no one knew or even gave a shit

And that's why Asemu is a bad character. His character arc is supposed to be about him getting out of his fathers shadow and becoming great despite being a normal human being without X-rounder powers. But he doesn't earn anything like everyone else would have to. He starts off his military career by piloting the most advanced mobile suit the federation has to offer right off the bat when there was definitely hundreds if not thousands of more qualified pilots at the time. After a couple of episodes, his mobile suit gets an uprade that essentially allows him to forego skill and simply overpower x-rounders while they just go "NANI?!". And then like >>17052755 said, when that doesn't work, he's suddenly able to dick Desil in the ass in for no explained reason at all other than the music kicking in.

I could continue but my brain's just scattered right now so I'm gonna stop here and continue at a later time if I feel like it.

>>17060233Asemu didn't 'turn traitor', he was left to die by the Feds (who declared him MIA while salvaging the AGE System), and when the pirates talked him into leading them they spent their time preying on Feds compromised by the Vagans. The reason he wasn't shot as a traitor was that he was the one actually shooting traitors.

Also, considering how compromised the Feds were by the Vagans, not prolonging that supposedly bloody conflict would have meant they won, and given what they do to their own civilians (or let the Mars Rays do to them), you can't expect a bloodless occupation out of them. Asemu was definitely saving his "allies'" lives in the long run. Unlike his son.

>>17059386>stopped allies from getting killshots on Vagans but doing nothing to save those same allies with his magical pacifism funnels

Starting from the FX's debut, Kio has exactly one scene of blocking an allied shot, and it was aimed at a Vagan pilot he'd already disabled. He doesn't even interfere with Seric later on during the action when they were side-by-side; Kio disables his target, Seric shoots his, it's Seric that ponders how long Kio will continue fighting like this; Kio says nothing about Seric's kill. To add, Kio's disables are actual disables, instead of just shooting an arm, a head, or a rifle off.

With regards to Kio, they then move on to La Gramis, and it mostly repeats itself like the moonbase battle; Kio fights alongside Federation forces, disables some mooks, gets temporarily successful with Deen in a 1-on-1 with no one else involved while it went on, and then gets tangled by enemy ace and special units and doesn't engage anymore mooks in battle. That the Vagans vape most of the faceless Feds with a fuckoff cannon had nothing to do with Kio, seeing as nobody on the Federation side knew of it or were close enough to stop it prior.

Age knows what kind of action and drama scenes they want, but the series' writing is fucking terrible -emphasis on "fucking terrible"- at the required effort to set them up. Asemu's "super pilot", Shaunala's betrayal, Girad's "tragic defection", and the infamous Lu arc are the biggest examples that lose a lot of their impact because they either had the wrong buildup or zero buildup.

>>17060287>he was left to die by the Feds (who declared him MIA while salvaging the AGE System)They can't recover a person who wasn't even at the scene when they arrived.

I don't agree that he committed outright treason either, but all he did in over a decade's worth of time was to raid ships. As far as anyone knows, he never even attempted reaching out to Flit, the one person least likely to be pro-Vagan, nor any other form of outreach in the expanded materials. Nobody benefits because while the Vagans didn't get traitor supplies and personnel, there was also zero chance of loyalist Feds using the information to set up their own sting ops or at least work with the pirates to stop wasting supplies and possibly the lives of unsuspecting loyalists mixed in the crew during the pirate purges. Had Asemu's return to the story been a "to fool your enemies, first fool your friends" affair where he had some kind of cooperative link with the Federation, even just as an info broker on the ships he hit, his actions would have made sense as some kind of dagger-under-the-table; but as it is in the series, at best, he's a non-allied third party whose actions bring coincidental benefits.

Meanwhile, Kio's short stint sees him participate in 3 major Federation operations and other battles, doesn't defect despite his ideals, and his "pacifist disables", of which he only applies to himself and never disparage or hinder his allies for not following, are meticulous enough to reduce his enemies to complete non-factors within the scope and context of the ongoing local operation/conflict, unlike a certain other "shoot-to-disable" pilot for which the color orange causes him to forget that MS have mounted weapons.

To put dadAsemu on a higher pedestal than Kio solely because of the latter's pacifist moralfagging is silly, especially when the Asemu generation arc is already low-tier at trying to develop Asemu and the rushed-as-fuck Kio generation arc does almost nothing to help.

>>17062121People tend to ignore that the killshots Kio stopped were on defenseless, disabled cockpits or the fact that when his allies died he tended to be engaged on some other part of the battlefield.

Really though, each of the Asuno's reps some aspect of Kira. Kio has the fighting style that focuses on disabling MS, but has a far greater commitment to his ideals. This highlights greater compassion, whereas SEED used disabling MS as a means to establish power levels, with Kira going for the kill when things got too tough. Flit has the black and white morality that leads to "we'll do whatever it takes to win, not matter what" and attempted genocide. Meanwhile Asemu has the "friend who's an enemy" thing and latter attacks both sides. This only prolongs the war, escalating it as each side grows more desperate, and he eventually has to fight his friend to the actual death. None of this "waking up in the PLANTS" copout bullshit.

The main thing is, Kio is an actual, principled pacifist (or becomes one, in the Generations arc). Things like SRW don't dunk on him for the same reason they don't dunk on Nekki Basara.

Kira on the other hand, is an inconsistent mess or ideas and approaches, and gets called out on it.

> Meanwhile Asemu has the "friend who's an enemy" thing and latter attacks both sides. This only prolongs the war, escalating it as each side grows more desperate

This is wrong though - Asemu deliberately chose perpetual war which would be a steady meatgrinder for the two forces, in exchange for them never escalating to a point where one side would be defeat the other and move onto their enemies civilian populations or reach power levels where one could engage in an extinction level event.